


The Woods

by Jothowrote



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, Statement, piles of nonsense
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-31
Updated: 2017-10-31
Packaged: 2019-01-27 04:59:46
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,149
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12574248
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jothowrote/pseuds/Jothowrote
Summary: Statement of Anna Gibbs, regarding her disappearance after a night run event. Original statement given February 23rd 2011.





	The Woods

**Author's Note:**

> This is my attempt at a statement for the wonderful Piles of Nonsense challenge! Happy Halloween everybody!
> 
> This is set vaguely around the beginning of series 2 or before the end of series 1- they know of Michael, but Jon hasn't yet gone full paranoid.

Statement of Anna Gibbs, regarding her disappearance after a night run event. Original statement given February 23rd 2011. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist at the Magnus Institute, London.

Statement begins.

I only came here because no one else is listening to me. No one else believes me – I mean, you probably won’t either, but at least I’m not the craziest person to come and talk to you guys.

The police didn’t believe me, because the ambulance people said that I had signs of `head trauma’ and that it’s likely my brain was just filling the gaps. But it wasn’t, ok? I remember it – I remember the whole thing. 

You might have seen it in the news. I apparently caused quite a stir, so it went even beyond the local newspaper. My Nan taped BBC news when they covered it, and showed it to me later. I was the woman who went missing for four days after a 10k night run. I’d done the night run the year before, too, but only the 5k. I’d done quite a bit of training since that, and a couple of 10k and half marathon races, so I thought I could cope with the extra distance in the dark.

The race was in the Leigh woods, over the other side of the Avon river to Bristol. On my walk there, over the famous suspension bridge, it was already spitting, but it died down by the time I got to the start line. It meant the course was disgustingly muddy, though – I spent most of the first few kilometres just trying to stay on my feet.

When I say night run, I mean night run. It started at seven, in November, so it was already dark when it began. You have to wear a headtorch – it’s in the rules. You can’t run without one. I had my headtorch from the year before. I’d never bought one before then, and it turned out that running headtorches were either ridiculously expensive, or a tenner. Obviously this means that they vary quite distinctly in quality, but I’m a recent uni grad and therefore burdened with both hideous debt and a poorly paid job. I bought the ten quid one, of course. 

It served me well enough in the 5k the year before, so I used it again for the 10k. I seem to always end up in the middle of the pack in these races, not good enough to be in the front groups and too fast for the rest. I get left in a weird no-man’s land between the two, where the people are much sparser and so there’s fewer headtorches. It’s pitch black in the woods, where the thick canopy blocks out the light pollution from the city. At the start of the race, when everyone was packed together, this wasn’t a problem. When we got to around 3k in and the packs of people had spread out much thinner, I found myself in the no-man’s land with only my own headtorch for light. I tripped over hidden rocks a couple of times, although only once properly falling. I took my headtorch off my head after that fall, and held it in my hand, so I could direct it better at the ground immediately in front of me. That was the only time I fell properly, and I caught myself on my hands and knees in the thick mud. I didn’t hit my head. I know I didn’t.

It was hard to see the reflective course markers they’d set out with only my headtorch in my hand for light, and after a few minutes or so, I realised I hadn’t seen any other runners for a while. As I still hadn’t even done 5k yet, I was a bit worried I’d taken a wrong turn somewhere. The Leigh woods are hard enough to navigate in the day, and I’ve got lost in them before, but in the dark it was impossible to know where I was. I slowed down in an attempt to wait for the runners I knew I’d passed by earlier, just to check I was still on the course. There were a good 300 people in total doing the night race, the majority doing the 5k, and so it was odd when, after I waited and walked for a few minutes, I was still alone. There were no signs of headtorches coming up towards me, and none in front. When I cast my torch around, I couldn’t see any reflective markers either.

It was then I really started to worry that I’d taken a wrong turn. I’d been following a thin man in a reflective vest for the beginning of the race, but he had been too fast for me to keep up and had vanished into the darkness ahead. I thought maybe I’d gone down the wrong path, gone towards the river maybe, close to the steep incline down to the water. I wandered around for a while, and the longer I didn’t see anyone, the more I began to panic.

I don’t know how long I walked around, trying to keep calm, looking for other runners, or marshals, or a sign to tell me where I was. When I started to panic properly, I saw a figure in the distance in the light of my headtorch. They didn’t look like they were running the night race, because they weren’t wearing anything reflective, and that, along with wearing a headtorch, had been in the rules. But they were a person, and might know the way back, so I headed towards them.

No matter how far or fast I moved, the figure never got any closer. After a while, when my headtorch began to look worryingly dim, I gave up and checked my phone in an attempt to use my GPS as a way to direct myself. The wood paths were too small to be on apple maps, but I thought I could use the direction as a compass. My phone was dead, despite my having charged it fully before setting off for the race that evening. 

Then I properly panicked. I shouted, screamed. I didn’t stop until my voice ran out. Quite literally, I screamed until my throat was so sore and my voice so hoarse that barely any sound came out. Sometime between starting to shout and falling quiet, my watch – which had a light up screen – also ran out of battery. My phone I could almost let go, as iPhones are notoriously bad with battery life, and mine had been my sister’s before me, and was a bit old and unreliable. But my watch should have lasted four days. The last time it worked, it told me it was six o clock in the morning, and I couldn’t understand how no one had noticed that I never finished the race.

I don’t know how long I wandered in those dark woods. Definitely long enough for the night to turn into day, but wherever I was, it stayed dark. My headtorch eventually went out – the cheap ones don’t last long – and I wandered in the darkness. I’ve never been afraid of the dark before, but that was when it was worst. When it was just completely dark.

I had fits and spurts of movement and determination – sometimes I ran in the pitch black, thinking that eventually I had to find my way out. Sometimes I gave up entirely and sat down in the mud, cold and wet and exhausted. I had no way to measure time, what with the permanent darkness and no phone or watch or light. Wherever I was, I knew for certain I wasn’t in the Leigh woods anymore. The Leigh woods are bracketed by a main road and the sharp drop down to the Avon gorge. If I had been there still, I would have eventually found the incline towards the river, or heard a car. But I never did. It was just an endless maze, miles and miles of darkness, and mud, and trees.

I occasionally saw the figure in the distance, the one who had led me deeper into this dark, wooded hell maze. Strangely enough, seeing that figure made me feel better. I’ve never had problems with being alone – in fact often I prefer it. I live alone, and I’ve never felt lonely in my own company. But when the figure was there, in the vague distance, it made the whole thing feel like I was there for a reason, which I found oddly comforting.

The figure wasn’t there very often.

I don’t know why it suddenly ended, but it did. One minute I was wandering in the dark, the next I emerged blinking onto the side of the main road at night, the streetlights burning my eyes like they were sunlight. I must have looked like a sorry sight, all covered in mud from falling over, bedraggled and drooping, because a car pulled over almost straight away.

It turned out I’d been missing for four days. For me, though, it had felt more like weeks, perhaps even months.

The paramedics and the police picked me up, once the man who’d pulled over had recognised me from the news and called them. They diagnosed me with head trauma, not to mention I was apparently starved and dehydrated, and I was in hospital for a few days so they could make sure I didn’t have any kind of brain damage. I had never felt hungry while I was in the woods. I'd never felt fatigued to the point where I needed to sleep, either. I had just kind of... been. I'd walked in the dark for months, and had never needed to eat or sleep.

I know I was missing for longer than four days. I don’t know why I was set free from wherever I had been – maybe the thing keeping me had got bored once I stopped feeling panicked and instead just resigned myself to my fate. Maybe they got distracted with something else.

Whatever it was, it let me go. I know that. I would never have escaped by myself.

I didn’t make it up. It happened. But no one believes me.

Statement ends.

JON: This could be Michael’s work – hell mazes are somewhat of a speciality of his. Of course, with the medical records showing definite signs of head trauma, from the evidence Tim managed to sweet-talk from his contact in the police, this could just be another addled, overwrought statement from someone who has a history of mental illness. Though Miss Gibb’s medical history only indicates severe social anxiety, this nevertheless could link to a certain tendency to overreact.

There is, however, an interesting discrepancy, one that Martin of all people found in the police statement. Despite the conclusion that Anna Gibbs had been knocked unconscious or similar in the woods and had been rendered insensible and unable to make her way out, the police had done a full sweep of the Leigh woods 72 hours after she had been recorded missing by the race organisers, and they found nothing. Martin pointed out that the Leigh woods nature reserve is only 2 square kilometres in size, and if they had scoured the woods as carefully as they say, it is strange that they did not find her, insensible as she must have been.

It is odd, though, that if she was one of Michael’s captured flies, that she was `let go’. Martin was actually able to get a hold of Anna Gibbs, but she declined to come in and give her statement herself. 

[Door opening]

MARTIN: I’ve got that research you wanted for Case 0090… oh, sorry. I thought you were done.

JON: No, I… since you’re here, would you mind stating the details of your phone conversation with Anna Gibbs? 

MARTIN: Sure. She didn’t seem that bothered about it, to be honest. Said it was a couple of years ago now and not important. She said she still runs in the dark, in those woods, and that she’d had no problems since.

JON: So there we go. It seems she must have fallen and hurt her head, and all of her experience was some kind of related trauma.

MARTIN: Well, maybe, but… 

JON: What, Martin.

MARTIN: Well, I was looking at her facebook – just to cover every avenue, you know – to see what she’d done since, and I noticed this. Look.

JON: That necklace… is it…

MARTIN: An open eye, yeah. She’s wearing it in pretty much every picture since that race. And before November 2010, she isn’t wearing it, but here – her friend is.

JON: Hmm. Well, that’s hardly conclusive, but… interesting. That was a… good find, Martin.

MARTIN: Thanks! Now, about Case 009-

JON: Wait, I’m still – oh for god’s sake. Statement ends.

[Recorder clicks]


End file.
